Silver is the traditional gift on a twenty-fifth anniversary, and Avast is one of the few antivirus companies that's been around long enough to reach that milestone. The installer for avast! Free Antivirus 2014 celebrates the company's silver anniversary status as well as the company's 200 million users worldwide.

As part of the celebration, the product's user interface has gotten a complete makeover. The main window reports security status and offers three big icons linking to important program features, plus a fourth marked "Add." Click that last one to add your own favorite feature, or right-click any of the four to swap features you use most; nice!

The 2014 edition also streamlines its collection of real time "shields" against malware. Previously users were confronted with status and configuration options for eight distinct shields. Those eight have been rolled up into three easy-to-understand shields: File System Shield, Web Shield, and Mail Shield. I like the new approach.

Good Ratings from the Labs Avast participated in all of the last 12 tests by Virus Bulletin and received VB100 certification in ten of those tests. ICSA Labs and West Coast labs both certify Avast's technology for virus detection; Avast didn't participate in the malware cleanup test by those labs. AV-Comparatives rated Avast ADVANCED for file detection; it rated STANDARD in another test that specifically measured how well products cleaned up malware they detected.

Protection against new malware attack is an essential antivirus feature, and Avast did well in several tests aimed at measuring protection. AV-Comparatives rated it ADVANCED+, the top rating, in a dynamic test using the very latest malware. AV-Test gave it 5.5 of 6.0 possible points for protection, and Dennis Technology Labs certified Avast at the AA level (AAA is the top rating).

False positives, valid programs blocked as malicious, can be a real problem. Avast didn't lose points for false positives in tests by AV-Comparatives or Dennis Labs. Getting a good Usability score from AV-Test requires few or no false positives; Avast earned 6.0 of 6.0 possible points. However, as you'll see later, it generated some significant false positives in my own tests.

In two performance tests, Avast's results differed quite a bit. AV-Comparatives rated it ADVANCED+, while AV-Test assigned it 3.0 of 6.0 possible points. Overall, Avast gets good marks from the labs.

Decent Malware Blocking Starting with this review, I've added a new malware blocking test using a feed of malicious URLs supplied by MRG-Effitas. Each URL is no more than a day or so old, but even so by the time I use them in testing many are already defunct. I keep trying URLs until I've accumulated a hundred or so, recording whether the antivirus blocked access to the URL, quarantined the download, or just did nothing.

Avast's Web Shield jumped in to block URL access for 69 percent of the samples. It quarantined another 10 percent at some point during the download process, for a total of 79 percent blocked. Since this is the first data point for this test, I can't say whether that's a good score or not; time will tell.

Continuing my malware-block testing, I opened a folder containing my current collection of malware samples. For many antivirus products, the minimal file access that occurs when Windows Explorer checks a file's attributes for display is enough to trigger an on-access scan. Avast! waits for a click, so I dutifully clicked up and down the list, noting which items got sent to quarantine. In the end, avast! whacked 78 percent of the samples.

With 8.9 points overall for malware blocking, avast! is in the lower half of products tested with the same malware collection. Quite a few products are tied for first place, 9.4 points, including AVG, Avira, and Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ 10.5. For full details on how I perform this test, see How We Test Malware Blocking.

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